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Trump SEC Overhaul Fuels Oversight Debate Over Family Crypto Conflicts

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US financial regulators just rewrote the rulebook. On Tuesday, the SEC and CFTC released joint guidelines classifying the vast majority of digital assets as commodities or “digital tools,” stripping the SEC of its previous enforcement-heavy oversight role.

The move immediately fueled conflict-of-interest allegations regarding World Liberty Financial, the DeFi project controlled by the Trump family.

Key Takeaways:
  • Token Taxonomy: New SEC-CFTC guidelines classify most crypto assets as commodities, exempting them from securities registration.
  • Conflict Concerns: Insiders argue the shift directly benefits World Liberty Financial by reducing disclosure burdens for the Trump family project.
  • Legislative Bridge: Chair Paul Atkins frames the rules as a temporary measure while Congress stalls on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

The Mechanics of the ‘Token Taxonomy’ Shift Explained

SEC Chair Paul Atkins calls it a “token taxonomy.” The market calls it a total reversal. Speaking at the Blockchain Summit in DC, Atkins confirmed the regulator is “not the ‘securities and everything commission’ anymore.”

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The new joint guidelines with the CFTC explicitly categorize most digital assets—including payment tokens, collectibles, and utility assets—as distinct from securities.

This creates a massive regulatory moat. Under the previous administration, these assets faced existential legal threats for failing to register.

Now, they are officially deemed “digital tools.” Only direct blockchain-based representations of existing securities, such as tokenized stocks and bonds, remain under the strict purview of the SEC. This is the operational rollout of the regulation philosophy Atkins promised: innovation first, enforcement second.

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The timing is critical. While the administration pushes for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the legislation remains stalled in Congress due to disputes over stablecoin interest provisions. Atkins is not waiting for the vote.

By issuing these guidelines now, agencies are creating a provisional safe harbor that mimics the Act’s intended structure without requiring legislative approval. The agencies frame this as a “bridge” to provide certainty, but it effectively sidelines the stricter oversight mandates that defined the Gensler era.

Does the New Framework Shield Family Interests?

The policy shift creates an immediate governance paradox. Market insiders note that the primary beneficiary of this deregulated environment is likely World Liberty Financial, the lending protocol launched by the Trump family.

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Under the Biden-era interpretation, project insiders faced strict lockup periods and heavy disclosure requirements. The new “digital tool” classification effectively bypasses those hurdles.

Todd Baker, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School, argues the framework is tailored to facilitate “profit-making but socially valueless” trading free from federal oversight.

The contrast with recent history is sharp. Just months prior, the industry was navigating heavy litigation, such as cases where Gemini was sued over its internal governance and strategy shifts.

The new rules likely preclude similar enforcement actions against projects like World Liberty Financial, provided they do not tokenize existing securities.

Critics argue this creates a two-tier system where connected projects gain faster access to liquidity. However, supporters like The Digital Chamber’s Cody Carbone see it as a necessary correction to keep the US competitive.

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With other jurisdictions vacillating, South Korea is still debating the total abolition of crypto taxes to prevent capital flight, the US is moving aggressively to cement its status as the global crypto capital. Summer Mersinger of the Blockchain Association framed the coordination as helpful in the “near term,” but the conflict of interest questions remain the headline.

The agencies have built their bridge, but it leads to a political minefield. Rules can be rewritten by the next chair; only legislation provides cement. Until the Clarity Act clears Congress, the market is trading on administrative permission, not law.

Discover: The best new crypto in the world

The post Trump SEC Overhaul Fuels Oversight Debate Over Family Crypto Conflicts appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Treasury Secretary Bessent now says it’s OK for the Fed to wait to lower rates amid oil surge

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The Fed will most likely 'asterisk' inflation from tariffs and the war as one-offs, says Jim Cramer

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent waits for the first meeting of U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-fraud task force convened by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 27, 2026.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent said the Federal Reserve could wait to lower interest rates amid the oil spike, in a departure from his previous stance on monetary policy.

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“Do I think rates should be lowered? Eventually. I think now that we have to wait and see,” Bessent told Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith at the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington, DC.

Bessent has previously said that Fed Chair Jerome Powell should hasten cutting interest rates, saying in January that reductions are “the only ingredient missing for even stronger economic growth. Which is why the Fed should not delay.”

But the change in thinking comes amid the ongoing war in Iran, which has driven up oil prices to above $100 a barrel.

That complicates the Fed’s mandate, as it eyes rising inflation alongside slowing growth. The central bank was last expected to hold rates steady this year, with the slimmest possibility of a hike, according to fed funds futures pricing.

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Coming out of “January and February — the economy was very strong,” Bessent told Semafor.

Powell’s term as chair is up in May, but he could have to stay on longer if Trump’s chair nominee which Bessent helped select, Kevin Warsh, can’t get confirmed by the Senate by the time. Sen. Thom Tillis has vowed to block a Warsh vote until U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro ends her criminal probe into Powell related to Fed building cost overruns. Powell has said the probe is designed to put pressure on him by the Trump administration for not cutting rates more.

See the full Semafor story here.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.

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Polygon Is Fixing Crypto’s Idle Capital Problem

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Polygon Is Fixing Crypto’s Idle Capital Problem

Crypto has a capital efficiency problem.

For all the innovation we’ve seen in DeFi, a huge amount of onchain capital still sits idle. It’s staked, it’s locked, and it’s largely cut off from the rest of the financial system we’ve been building. That might have been acceptable a few years ago, but it doesn’t work for institutions.

Idle capital isn’t just inefficient, it’s incompatible with how modern financial systems operate.

Institutions don’t separate staking and markets in their thinking. They look at capital in terms of how hard it can work. Can it move? Can it generate yield? Can it be deployed across strategies without friction? If the answer is no, that capital becomes less attractive.

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The same is increasingly true in payments. Once money moves onchain, it shouldn’t just sit idle between transactions. It should be programmable, composable, and capable of generating yield even while it’s waiting to be used.

That’s the gap we’re focused on solving at Polygon Labs.

With the launch of sPOL, we’re introducing a canonical liquid staking standard for POL. In simple terms, it allows users to stake POL while still keeping that capital liquid and usable across onchain markets. You continue earning staking rewards, but you also gain the ability to deploy that same capital in trading, lending, and collateral strategies.

This is especially powerful in payments contexts, where capital often sits at rest between settlement cycles, treasury rebalancing, or cross-border flows. Instead of remaining idle, that capital can stay productive without sacrificing availability.

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That combination is what makes capital actually competitive.

If you look at Ethereum, liquid staking has already become a core part of the ecosystem. More than 40 percent of staked ETH is used in this way. On Polygon, it’s closer to 4 or 5 percent. That gap isn’t about demand. It’s about infrastructure.

Without a clear standard, liquidity fragments. Without liquidity, institutions don’t show up in size.

sPOL is designed to change that.

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When you stake POL, you receive sPOL, which represents your position and continues to earn yield. At the same time, it can be used across DeFi just like any other liquid asset. That means funds, market makers, and treasury teams can run more sophisticated strategies without giving up staking rewards or waiting through unbonding periods.

It also means payment providers, fintechs, and onchain businesses can treat idle balances not as dead weight, but as yield-generating assets that remain fully usable.

It turns staking from something passive into something you can actively manage.

But usable capital only matters if markets can support it.

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From day one, we’re seeding deep liquidity so sPOL is immediately functional at scale. We’re also integrating with venues like Uniswap v4 to ensure efficient execution and real market depth. At the same time, validator incentives are being structured to deliver more competitive yields, aligning participants across the network.

This is about building the conditions institutions expect as a baseline.

The impact is straightforward. There are billions of POL already staked. Even partial adoption of sPOL significantly expands the amount of capital actively participating in the ecosystem. That leads to deeper markets, better pricing, and more resilient liquidity.

It also strengthens the network itself. As more POL moves into productive staking positions, supply tightens and incentives align more clearly with long term participation.

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Stepping back, this is part of a broader shift.

Crypto is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. Stablecoins are becoming settlement layers. Real world assets are coming onchain. Institutions are no longer just watching, they’re allocating.

And as payments infrastructure moves onchain, expectations change. Capital isn’t just meant to move faster, it’s meant to work continuously, even in the moments between movement.

But they will only scale into systems that meet their standards.

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They need liquidity. They need composability. And they need capital that can be both productive and flexible at the same time.

That’s what we’re building with sPOL.

It’s not just an upgrade to staking. It’s a step toward making Polygon a place where capital behaves the way modern markets expect it to.

Because ultimately, the question isn’t how much capital is onchain.

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It’s how much of it is actually working, and where it chooses to work.

The post Polygon Is Fixing Crypto’s Idle Capital Problem appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Scroll moves to trim governance operations after major protocol defection

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Scroll moves to trim governance operations after major protocol defection

The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind Ethereum layer-2 network Scroll said it will propose a plan to dissolve its Security Council and transfer control of the network to an account managed by an internal team.

The proposal announcement comes two months after Scroll’s top fee-generating decentralized application (dapp), crypto neobank Ether.fi, moved to Optimism’s OP mainnet. That saw roughly 300,000 user accounts and more than $160 million in total value locked move away from the network.

In a governance update, a Scroll core contributor said the Security Council was simply too expensive. Scroll is laying off several contributors within the DAO and reducing the capacity of its operational committees. The handover is targeted for the next 10 days, pending support from the current council.

“After evaluating the Security Council’s cost relative to its actual usage over the past quarters, we believe continuation is no longer justified,” the post reads.

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The project said all contract changes would be executed transparently and remain verifiable onchain.

Adding to the network’s turbulence, a recent surge in Scroll’s network fees appeared to be artificially manufactured rather than a sign of organic demand.

Over six days in early April, the network raised the amount it charges to publish data to the Ethereum mainnet by a factor of 1,280, creating the illusion of a massive spike in 30-day chain fee momentum, according to analysis from L2BEAT.

The adjustment forced users to pay over $50,000 in excess transaction fees for data posting that ordinarily would have cost roughly $280. The extreme, temporary repricing was rolled back on April 9.

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Ether.fi’s migration moved around $13 million in annualized fees away from Scroll, according to DeFiLlama data, and trimmed the network’s TVL to around $23 million.

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XRPL Taps Boundless for Bank-Grade Privacy on Public Chains

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Ethereum, Privacy, zk-Rollup, Institutions

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) used by blockchain payments company Ripple has tapped Boundless, a zero-knowledge infrastructure provider, to let banks and asset managers execute confidential yet compliant transactions directly on the network, according to a Tuesday release shared with Cointelegraph.

Boundless chief executive Shiv Shankar told Cointelegraph the design aims to shield details like transaction size, frequency and counterparties from public view, while still allowing regulators to audit activity via selective disclosure and role-based access controls.

Boundless’ integration is meant to enable a range of institutional use cases that have historically been challenging to run on fully transparent ledgers. Those include cross-border business-to-business payments, treasury and capital management, over-the-counter positions, tokenized asset issuance and decentralized exchange or lending activity, where order flow and positions are highly sensitive, according to Shankar.

For public blockchains, that trade-off between transparency and confidentiality has become a central barrier to institutional adoption, as banks and asset managers seek to protect trading strategies and client activity without falling out of step with regulatory oversight. 

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The move positions XRPL in an increasingly competitive race to deliver bank-grade privacy on public blockchains, as institutions push to avoid what Shankar described as the “transparency tax” of fully visible onchain activity.

Privacy race expands across ZK and FHE approaches

In March, cryptography company Zama integrated its fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) stack with institutional tokenization platform T-REX, pitching its technology as a confidentiality layer for ERC-3643 securities (tokenized financial instruments that embed compliance rules into the token standard) on upcoming T-REX public networks.

Related: Moody’s brings credit ratings onchain with Canton Network integration

Other projects are betting on different flavors of zero-knowledge technology, including zkSync’s Prividium environment, which aims to anchor private institutional execution to Ethereum via ZK proofs while keeping raw transaction data off public view.

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Shankar said that projects like zkSync require institutions to launch their own layer-2s, which involves greater investment and overhead. In contrast, Boundless deploys solutions via smart contracts, which he said allows institutions to “stay where the liquidity is” (on Ethereum), and “gain more flexibility on where they deploy their products.”

Shankar said the design aims to replicate the selective disclosure controls of traditional finance in an onchain environment, rather than forcing institutions to choose between privacy and compliance.

Privacy shifts from feature to core infrastructure

The rollout highlights how privacy is becoming a feature of base-layer and tokenization infrastructure rather than an optional add-on.

The tokenized asset market reached $29.25 billion in April 2026, up 7.9% in a month, according to data from RWA.xyz.

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Ethereum, Privacy, zk-Rollup, Institutions
Total RWA value. Source: RWA.xyz

As more real-world assets migrate onchain and traditional players experiment with tokenized funds, deposits and securities, pressure is mounting on networks to accommodate both institutional secrecy and supervisory oversight.

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